Hate the notch? Then you need Notcho, a free app that creates wallpapers that hide the black camera-and-sensor array on the iPhone X, making it look like a black bezel instead.
Notcho nixes the notch
Notcho comes from Cromulent Labs, the folks behind Cult of Mac fave Music Launcher. Notch takes any picture you like, and adds a nicely-curved black bar at the top. The bar’s pixels are precision-machined to line up with the notch, filling in the empty ears with black. The result is very neat. It looks like the iPhone X has a regular black status bar at the top, with the network info, time, and battery icons all displayed as if this were a notches iPhone.
Photo: Cromulent Labs
This trick only works on the lock screen and the home screen, though, because — of course — wallpaper isn’t displayed in apps. Still, it may make the transition easier for notch-haters who nevertheless dropped a grand on a phone they couldn’t stand. The other option is to opt for an all-black wallpaper, which looks fantastic on the OLED screen, and could make your battery last longer.
No notch
Notcho comes with a few pre-made wallpapers to get you started. These might also provide an answer as to why Apple didn’t choose to hide the notch in normal use. With a Notcho wallpaper loaded, the iPhone X looks like it has a shorter screen. The black stripe looks a lot like the black bezel found on other iPhones. Despite the weirdness of the two ears either side of the notch, they show one thing clearly — that the screen reaches all four corners of the iPhone display. That’s important when one of the iPhone X’s major gimmicks is that it has an edge-to-edge screen.
Given this, it wouldn’t surprise me to find a setting added later, perhaps in iOS 12, to permanently add a black bar up top, in the style of Notcho. Then again, in a year’s time perhaps developers would have found all kinds of neat ways to exploit the notch, making its elimination pointless, or even troublesome.
Until then, there’s Notcho.
Price: $Free
Download: Notcho from the App Store (iOS)
